This is a refreshing take on the state of (post)modern literature. I have two degrees in English from a postmodern cultural Marxist rats nest and was thoroughly steeped in its writing, theory, and ideology, it’s agenda and merits were extolled unilaterally. Years later I came across Jordan Peterson’s critiques and my eyes have since been opened to the many unaknowledged counterpoints to and critiques of postmodern dogma.
I think our cultural landscape needs more of the opposing perspective this post articulates, it makes a valuable contribution to a myopic and lopsided conversation and I hope it draws criticism from the legions of indoctrinated shills–of which I was one for many years–still infected by the pathology. We need more conversations like this. That said, I still can’t dismiss the last 50ish years of postmodern writing with a hand wave.
The state of the postmodern ‘movement’ today is seizure-like, a far cry from where it started with Thomas Pynchon’s early experiments. David Foster Wallace’s essays continue to be some of my favourites to date. Experience and intuition tell me that postmodernism has just run it course. Today, those trying to extract value from it as an aesthetic, are swilling the dregs, and won’t be able to forever. Still there’s lots to appreciate and learn from across the spectrum of the postmodern canon – just as there’s lots to leave behind.
Others have been working on a way out of the the ‘post’ post-modern void too. I recommend the leftist professor and lawyer Seth Abramson’s essays on the nascent metamodernist movement. It looks like a synthesis of the working parts of the modern and postmodern ethoses without the trenchant dogma and radicalism.
